Don't Look Away

I wrote a new song about the issues that are weighing on me, closest to my heart in these dark times: human rights and the environment. It is a song for the midterm elections in November, about voting.  Enclosed at the end of this post are two versions, one with just the lyrics on one page, and one with chords over a few pages.  It is easy to play on a guitar, please feel free to sing it if you like it when you hear the song. This song is dedicated to a man that I do not know. His name is Cody Hall, and he spoke in a moving youtube video, "Mni Wiconi: The Stand at Standing Rock". He made an eloquent call to action.  This song is my answer to his call -- Mr. Hall, thank you, I listened to my heart.

Cody Hall is a warrior and a leader, and he comes from a lineage of great leaders: Chief Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse. He leads by word and the example of his courage. I am a nerd who loves music, who, since Nov. 2016, cries a lot. I am from a lineage of good farmers. My name, Korber, means "weaver", a family name that links me to some long forgotten ancestor who did something useful for work, and I like to imagine, maybe even something beautiful. We sang a lot in my house when I was growing up. Protest songs: Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez. We always cared about justice, both for people and for the Earth. My sister and I were taught to respect people like Cody Hall, people willing to sacrifice so much to try to make our country, our collective home, better and stronger. I personally care a lot about science, and like most scientists in our times, I express myself through slide shows. So I did what I could do, made a song, and a slide show video.  Here's to Charts, Graphs, and Rock 'n' Roll.  Here's to the brave Cody Hall.

Thanks to the wonderful musicians, friends old and new, who gave life to my tune. I will be posting a recording and a YouTube video to go with it, sung by my amazing friend and musical mentor, Lisa Carman.  I'm honored to have had the talented Jono Manson, Satish Pillai, Paul Pearcy, Justin Bransford, Adrienne Bellis, Janice Ritter, and Michael MacDonald in musical collaboration to record the song, as well as Peter Oviatt who brings All Hands On Deck with his banjo for the video credits. And thanks to the all the photographers whose work I weave; your art visually tells the stories of our times. Photo credits are at the end of the video.

Also, I want to explain my motivation for including of one of photos I have in the video. It is there for a complicated reason. It is of sweet little girl who looks so afraid, at the border crossing in Texas with her mother. It is picture by John Moore/Getty. Mr. Moore has shown us with an unflinching clarity the deep human suffering in our borderlands. His work as a photojournalist helped wake up our nation's compassion. His photo of this little girl went viral. Some sources who posted it were confused about her status, and thought she had been separated from her mom, so it was a big story when her father wrote in that she and her mom had not been separated. But because of this confusion, the far right shrilly screamed "FAKE NEWS"; I viewed this as a cynical attempt to drown out the real story, and distract our nation from our newly found resolve to treat asylum seekers better.  And distracted we were. Over and over the press coverage was about the many people calling this picture fake, shifting our attention from the families. As a consequence, for precious days, the national debate on the issues was confounded.

Photo by John Moore/Getty;  Asylum seekers, June 12, McAllen, Texas

She is in my video because her tears are their own truth. I'm weary of people simply bellowing "FAKE NEWS!", and the news coverage of The Bellow then drowning out the deeper truths we are forgetting as a nation how to recognize. This is just one example of this dangerous pattern. In this particular case, the deeper truth this picture reflects is that asylum seekers have often journeyed far through terrible conditions; many faced this journey because they were fleeing terrors we can only begin to imagine. Once they are at our border, but only at our border or in our lands, they have a right to ask for asylum and to have their case considered. This is under international law for refugees, human rights laws that America helped craft and has historically supported. This little one's face was a real refection of a real moment on her and her mom's journey to seek asylum.  She was afraid. There is power and truth in this photo. As this photo came out, our government was beginning to report that many many other children, at just such a moment, were taken away from their parents and put into child detention centers, through the "Zero Tolerance Policy" imposed by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Trump administration policy. Alex Azar, secretary of Health and Human Services acknowledged 3,000 children had been taken by July 5th, 2018. The kids are so vulnerable, and so are their parents. What lifetime scars has Mr. Session's brutality left them with? These people deserve respect and consideration of their case. We should greet them with compassion, not fear. Could you have taken your child through such a journey, risking all to seek safety, and survived?

Fact checking and truth is important. Corrections when mistakes are made are valuable and good. When this picture was so much in the news, it was right for the press to be very clear that she and here mom were not separated. But what should our response be, as human beings, to learning our small friend was not taken from her mother? How about "Thank God, these two are together!" instead of "FAKE NEWS!".

Thanks to what remains of our Free Press, which is under constant attack from this administration, the American people saw the horror of family separation, even though our government for the most part closed these children's camps off from public view. And when we learned about it, our people demanded that it stop. Our country turned out to have limited tolerance for zero tolerance, once we understood the implications. Our courts also demanded that the separations stop, and that separated families be reunited, in response to the legal case for the families brought forward by the ACLU. But Jeff Session's nightmare policy had been so poorly implemented that for many of the children, they did not even keep record of who they were, who their parents were.  Some babies were so little they could not yet even speak their own names -- so they even stole their names, when that and their family's love were all they had in the world. As a consequence, now that at least we are going in the right direction and making progress in righting this terrible wrong, the process of reuniting families has been muddled and is shamefully slow.

We need to treat people with dignity and compassion.  We are Americans.  We can do this.

Creative Commons License
CC Modification: It is OK to sing this song in any live performance, non-profit or for profit.

With chords:

Mni Wiconi: The Stand at Standing Rock 

Creative Commons License
CC Modification: It is OK to sing this song in any live performance, non-profit or for profit.

Gila Remembers

Lyrics

Saturday night, Jan. 27, 2018.

I wrote a song and created a music video about the Gila (pronounced “Hee La”) River: Gila Remembers. Just finished last night.

Me being verbose-me, I wanted to explain my feelings about this little Gila Remembers song.  It has 3 parts.

First, just the river.  She is utterly beautiful. She doesn’t need us to be so. Her water is the heart of the complex ecosystem that thrives around her, a rich thread of life that evolved to live in harmony with her, her rhythms and cycles.  

The second part is about the Native peoples whose ancestors lived along the Gila’s banks before the Spanish, the Mexicans, and then the United States invaded their homelands.  Through attending the Gila River Festival, JT and I took a hike guided by a Diné Forest Ranger, and the Fort Sill Apache tribal historian, Michael Darrow. I did not know the history of the Fort Sill Apache at all before that walk. It was the story of a strong people who fearlessly defended their way of life and homeland. They were attacked by the Spanish, the Mexicans, and then United States. Michael made a "humph" sound when he was asked by a woman in our group if it was true Apache women could be warriors. The essence of his reply was that the people did what needed to be done. Men and women: warriors, hunters. Men and women: minding the kids, tending dinner… Michael was very gentle with the plants around us.  He knew them so well, and could often say their names in many ways: Genus species, Apache name, common name, human use, each like an old friend.  Walking with him for day opened my eyes to a dimension of the forest that usually was hidden from me.

After the Chiracahua Apache finally surrendered in 1886, they were taken from their homeland, shipped to prisons, first in Florida, then to Alabama, finally to Oklahoma, and they were all kept as prisoners of war, for 27 years. 27 years!? Their children were taken from their families. How did I not know their story? It is a story that should be remembered. American history 101 should honor Native peoples stories, the stories of people of color, immigrants stories, as we are all woven together in this nation. The human costs of the very violent, often heartbreaking, parts of our history should be understood so we can better understand their consequences and stand up now for peace and compassion. Here is a fine telling of a bit of the Apache story, worth a listen:

and more information:

https://fortsillapache-nsn.gov

Perhaps through recognizing wrongs of the past we can learn to better recognize when justice is calling out to us now, in our own moment. This moment. So remember Lozen, her humanity, her dignity. But also think of the courage of the water protectors at Standing Rock – they helped us all to remember that water is life, that the Earth is our home. Some of these brave people are facing trials and time in prison. So, today, remember Red Fawn Fallis, and Rattler (Michael Markus).  Its Red Dawn's time in court.  Hope and pray that her trial is fair. 

Water Protector Legal Press Release, Red Fawn Fallis

Denver Post 2018/01/19/ Red-Fawn-Fallis

Esquire: Still fighting at standing rock

Finally, the third part is about Aldo Leopold. He was a foundational thinker in terms of our modern understanding of ecology. My esteemed friend Jimmy Killingsworth encouraged me to read Aldo’s Sand County Almanac. So I did, and learned, among other things, about Aldo’s land ethic. Beautiful ideas! Much of what I grew up believing about the environment and land management, ideas I had just accepted as given, were notions first articulated by Aldo. He had the capacity to learn from the lands he lived in, and animals he lived among, as well as from great thinkers that came before him. He folded this all together with a great clarity into poetic and practical guidance for agriculture and land management, and for stewardship of the Earth. He spent much time in New Mexico, and we have the Aldo Leopold wilderness and the Gila wilderness as a physical part of his legacy; these are places one can contemplate his land ethic, revealed.

Also, if you're here, you likely know I’m not a native person, but I love Native American music.  I attended and loved witnessing some Montana pow-wows growing up, this followed by many decades of happy listening to Singing Wire on the radio, living near Pueblo people and hearing their music, Robert Mirabal concerts, all shaped my musical sensibility. (I’m thinking that this is likely obvious.) So this song was influenced by a mishmash of Native musical traditions, but also founded in my own family’s folk music traditions, and my sister Dorothy's wonderful singing, and a bit of the Irish  (though I'm not a bit of Irish, either, in my heritage, just my music). The beautiful deep frame drum sound in the song was the voice of a Taos pueblo drum. This song was created with a very sincere hope to honor the river and her history, and I hope I've not inadvertently offended anyone. Respect for long history of the Chiricahua Warm Springs Apache in Gila River country made it seem impossible for me to write this song without singing them into it, so there they are.  Their ancestors lived in harmony with the Gila and her mountains for generations, and some survived the unimaginable when they were forcibly taken away from their home; and their strength should be honored and their loss remembered.  

In the autumn of 2016, Fort Sill Apache dancers came to Silver City and danced the their Mountain Spirit dance in their homeland for the first time in 130 years. They welcomed the Gila River Festival folks to attend. It was wonderful! Their dance was mysterious, ancient, beautiful, and playful at times. After they danced, they invited everybody to join in for some social dancing. Giant circles, DRUMS!, spinning lines of people linking arms, facing forward, backward, forward, backward, a happy human geometry around a bonfire under the stars.  James and I were back and did this again in 2017.  Hoping for a 2018 repeat!

I also particularly want to thank: Lisa Carman, who enables me to write songs, and tolerates my singing very well; Sky Korber, for that fiddle, who frees me up to make music with his kindness and his cover; Peter Oviatt for his amazing banjo, his water music; and Ron Chee for allowing me to include his beautiful paintings in the video; Ron is a native artist, though not Apache, still they to particularly to echo some of the history. I love his work, deeply appreciate his letting me include it.

_____________________

It’s a critical time to be thinking and learning about the Gila, the NM legislature is in session, and there are two bills that could impact the future of the river being considered this month (Funds for non-diversion Gila River projects (HB127 and SB72)). 2019 is looming, an important year as New Mexico has a deadline for finalizing a plan regarding whether federal funding will be sought for diversions of the Gila River, or alternatively for water conservation and restoration projects. Our farmers could have more opportunities to implement state of the art techniques in water conservation.  I would like our beautiful state of New Mexico state to lead something powerful good rather that always being 49th or 50th. With water conservation, we have a head start, with our amazing Acequia system, shared by communities and flowing to our crops, and Albuquerque's incredible reductions in water use since the 1990s as inspiration. Lets build on this! The upper Gila could remain a wild river, with all of the ecological diversity that fosters. 

The issues are complex, and important in our state. Look up into our mountains; there is so little snow, it's January. Worried? I am. It’s our responsibility as citizens to think about the best way to go forward together, but the issues are complex.

You can read more in the links I included below. Also, I shared a link to the Gila Conservation Coalition, a great resource. They host an amazing festival in Silver City each year, a long weekend end of September, I highly recommend it if you want to learn the history, walk with people who know the botany and the birds, and get into some wild and beautiful country that will refresh your spirit.

Some “Gila diversion” links:

Gila Conservation Coalition

Times Opinion: Philip Connors, on the Gila

NM political report #GilaRiver 

Some rough approximation of the melody, I'm not very good at this.  I play it in open D.
The song was written though 2017, finished most of the recording at Palace Sudio, Santa Fe, Dec. 2017. (c) Bette Korber, Dec. 2017.